Month: October 2014

Just A Note

One of the things we’re proudest of here at the Dish is our readership and the way we’ve all somehow created a space where readers can write and express themselves about some of the most personal and wrenching experiences in their lives – and convey truths that are hard to find in other places. The Cannabis Closet series was one of them. The “It’s So Personal” series on late-term abortions was another. Our recent reader who wrote about her own rape is yet another. What has long struck me about this almost unique aspect of the Dish is not just the fact that readers feel safe to write us, knowing that their identities will be absolutely confidential, but that the quality of the writing is so high. I edited a great magazine for five years and I can tell you that it was incredibly rare for professional writers to produce that kind of prose. This is just to say that yesterday, we ran an email that is one of the most beautifully written and utterly compelling pieces of journalism you can find anywhere. It’s about corporal punishment. I read it again today. If you missed it, drop everything and read it now.

The Dish is an exhausting, tough and never-ending labor for the handful of us who do it. We’re struggling to find a way to pay for it, and constantly trying to innovate. There have been times lately when I have felt really depleted by the daily effort – and that’s true for all of us. But then we get an email like this one. And I realize that what we have is not just a job; but an immense and humbling privilege.

Leung Stalls

As the midnight deadline set by demonstrators for him to resign approached, Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying refused to step down but pledged to hold talks between Chief Secretary Carrie Lam and the protestors:

Leung praised the Hong Kong police and the SAR government for their restraint. He said that the protests would continue to be tolerated as long as protestors do no attempt to occupy important government buildings, such as the police headquarters and the chief executive’s office. Leung said that he did not want a confrontation between police and protestors, and urged protestors not to advance on the police cordons. When asked about reports that the Hong Kong police are armed with rubber bullets, Leung emphasized that the police will continue to exercise restraint. Still, he also urged to protestors to end their occupation of the city center.

Though Leung offered the protestors a dialogue with Carrie Lam, there still seems to be little to no room for compromise. Leung insisted repeatedly that the dialogue and the ultimate solution must follow Hong Kong’s Basic Law and work within the framework of the National People’s Congress Standing Committee (NPCSC) decision on Hong Kong’s elections. Following these two guidelines is the only way to have universal suffrage in 2017, Leung told reporters. The protestors have already indicated they are not willing to accept the NPSC decision, which would  see all candidates for chief executive be nominated  by a Beijing-friendly committee.

Occupy Central still insists that Leung must step aside in order to break the impasse. Melinda Liu argues that a negotiated outcome is still possible, if only President Xi Jinping will allow it:

In fact, there is some room to maneuver for both sides. Although Hong Kong residents are unlikely to get the precise sort of direct vote protesters are demanding, the composition of the election committee that vets nominees, the number of nominees and the use of secret balloting could be open to negotiation. There’s also a possibility that Leung may be cashiered eventually, though if that happens before 2017 his successor will be chosen the same way he was.

The question is whether Xi can afford to project an image of weakness by permitting such negotiations and considering even minor compromises. The demonstrations that are paralyzing Hong Kong’s Central district today have as many dissimilarities with Tiananmen Square in 1989 as they have parallels. And the world has changed dramatically, as has China. But in the end the outcome may ride on the same question that so frightened the Communist Party mandarins back then: whether the leader in charge of the world’s largest authoritarian nation can stomach an uprising of democracy for very long.

Srdja Popovic and Tori Porell praise the protest movement’s organization, orderliness, and focus:

Although it may seem obvious that a protest movement must win popular support to combat oppression, it is no easy feat, and something we have seen movements in dozens of countries fail to accomplish. The staunch adherence to nonviolence Occupy Central has demonstrated takes preparation, training, and discipline—a combination that’s very rare for many movements. Most of the time, organizers aren’t prepared to handle the crowds that surge into the streets, and with no way to maintain calm and cohesion, too many movements have been derailed by a few thrown rocks or smashed storefronts. Governments seize on the smallest acts of disorder or violence as excuses to crack down. However, Occupy Central’s organizers seem to have come prepared. By issuing the manual and attempting to train their activists, they have maintained a united front and warded off the pitfalls that plague too many social movements.

But Richard C. Bush fears that this won’t last:

The unity and leadership of the opposition camp is a matter for concern. The New York Times had a good article this morning on the amorphous, loosely led character of the movement (“Hong Kong Protests Are Leaderless but Orderly”). Those who are seeking more democracy than Beijing is willing to grant are quite “democratic” within their ranks. The pro-democracy camp has suffered serious fragmentation over the last two decades, to its own detriment. This is a cause for serious concern. The beginning of the current crisis began when one faction of the pro-democracy camp decided on Friday evening to independently undertake action that was more radical than other factions preferred.

Chris Beam spots some hostility toward mainland Chinese around the edges of the movement, which could hurt its image:

Occupy Central organizers have done their best to distance themselves from the anti-mainland movement and keep the focus on election reform and universal suffrage. … But pro-democracy ideas and anti-mainland sentiment can be difficult to tease apart in Hong Kong. Many protesters want autonomy for Hong Kong in order to boost policies that will mitigate the influence of mainland Chinese on the island. For example, they support liming the number of properties that mainlanders can buy in Hong Kong and tightening visa regulations. (Ironically, the much-denounced chief executive C.Y. Leung has promoted some of these policies.) Of course, defensive policy positions easily blur with personal feelings toward mainland Chinese.

On the other hand, James Palmer argues that “Hong Kong is in many ways more Chinese these days than mainland China”, and that “might be what scares the authorities so much”:

The shrines and altars that dot Hong Kong speak to the richness of Chinese custom, annihilated between 1949 and 1976 in the mainland. … Hong Kong preserves hobby clubs, literary societies, family associations, clan ties and ancestral temples that once made up the fabric of Chinese society. In mainland cities, the once-vast variety of regional cultures and traditions has been wracked twice over; first by Maoist persecution and then by waves of migration and materialism. Most of all, the Hong Kong protests themselves are part of a great Chinese tradition, not only of peasant revolt and popular uprising, but of the student demonstrations that made China’s 20th century, from the protests of 4 May 1919 onwards. The Chinese public have never been the complacent sheep or communal masses of some westerners’ imagination, but an active, powerful force.

Overall, Jeffrey Wasserstrom is pessimistic about China’s political future:

Alas, what we have seen is Beijing leaping from a lack of self-confidence straight to a projection of arrogance. It is more insistent than ever on joining the global order only on its own terms. The party used to legitimate its rule by promising a China more equal than the country had ever been, run by an organization less corrupt than its predecessors. Now, flagrant inequalities and bountiful instances of corruption are exposed regularly.

So what rationale is left? Well, only a strong state can protect the nation’s interest in a chaotic world, the party line goes. And the current sorry state of the wider geopolitical world makes harping on this theme easier than it should be for Beijing. A cloak of counterterrorism hides state-waged terrors chillingly resonant of Cultural Revolution. The Hong Kong protesters are voices of freedom. When we look back on the demonstrations in 10 years, will we hear the song of China’s trajectory? Or will it be an elegiac tune that only makes us wistful for what China could have been?

Follow all of our Hong Kong coverage here.

The Most Reliable Birth Control We’re Not Using, Ctd

Rebecca Leber flags some new medical advice for teens: “The American Academy of Pediatrics has just revised its official position on birth control: The academy’s new guidance advises members to recommend intrauterine devices (IUDs) and progestin implants as the most effective birth control methods available”:

The announcement, which appears in the flagship journal Pediatrics, is important for its own sake— because it’s likely to change patterns of medical practice—and reduce the incidence of pregnancy. It’s also important for what it says about the ongoing controversy over who should pay for contraception. …

IUD usage in the U.S. is still fairly rare in the United States, especially among teens (just 3 percent of teens rely on IUDs). But that is finally changing, rising from just 2 percent to 8.5 percent between 2002-2009. One likely reason that may continue to change is, under the Affordable Care Act, all insurance policies must cover birth control fully, without extra out-of-pocket costs. Implanting an IUD is expensive—it can run several hundred dollars, without insurance—so the coverage makes a difference.

Some conservatives might bristle at the idea of pediatricians counseling teens about sex. But the new guidelines make clear that “Adolescents should be encouraged to delay sexual onset until they are ready.” The problem, the article explains, is that “existing data suggest that, over time, perfect adherence to abstinence is low (i.e., many adolescents planning on abstinence do not remain abstinent).”

Julia Lurie explains why this is such a big change:

It’s no secret that a lot of teens have sex; according to the report, nearly half of US high school students report having had sexual intercourse. Each year, 750,000 teenagers become pregnant, with over 80 percent of the pregnancies unplanned. But the recommended AAP guidelines are a huge step away from the current practices of the 3.2 million teenage women using contraceptives; in fact, it seems that the frequencies with which teens use contraceptives are inversely related to their efficacy.

Lurie notes that “male condoms are by far the most frequent choice of contraception, with over half of teenage women reporting condom use the last time they had sex. According to the Centers for Disease Control, condoms have an 18 percent failure rate.” IUDs, on the other hand, “can prevent pregnancy for up to 10 years with a failure rate of less than 1 percent.” Meanwhile, James Hamblin homes in on the economic impact:

The United States has more teenage pregnancies than any other wealthy country, and the cost of that is around $11 billion every year─in the form of public assistance, care for infants more likely to suffer health problems, and income lost as a result of lower educational attainment and reduced earnings among children born to teenage mothers. So it’s especially interesting that only about 4.5 percent of women 15 to 19-years-old currently use LARC [IUDs].

Previous Dish on the devices here, here, here, and, more recently, here.

The Fear News Network

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Hotel rooms can occasionally make you watch Fox. It happens. And I know I should be better than this, but it’s still, yes, shocking in its relentless, cynical propaganda. I was watching a foul, smug gabfest headed by Greg Gutfeld late last night and they introduced a segment on the first Ebola case in the US. Immediately, they cut to a graphic of a gloomy looking Obama with the words “Only in Obama’s America.” Seriously. He’s now responsible for Ebola, it seems. And, of course, the subtle insinuation that Ebola is a black disease and Obama is therefore somehow part of this dark menace coming to our shores was the subliminal message.

Then last Friday night, alone in my DC apartment – Aaron and the hounds are still in Provincetown – I also watched the Megyn Kelly show. You should never watch Fox alone. It was, of course, about the horrifying incident in Oklahoma that day where an obviously unstable and deranged worker had been fired and gone on a rampage, yelling Islamic slogans, and actually beheading one of his victims. It was obviously a deeply disturbing incident and certainly deserved coverage. But the coverage was designed not to lay out the facts, but to foment the most widespread fear imaginable. They played the full 911 tape – to accentuate the horror. They spoke of his possible ties to international terror groups. They had photos of him at a local mosque. They implied – in full McCarthy mode – that the authorities were covering up this Muslim in our midst out of political correctness or, in Obama’s America, government support for Islamist terror. Kelly intoned that this was “the first beheading on American soil,” implying that this was the beginning of a campaign to behead Americans all over the country. It was way into the segment before one of the guests, when asked why on earth the authorities weren’t describing this as an act of Islamist terror in the heartland, muttered that, well, in fact, the dude had just been fired at the place he worked, after a heated argument, and maybe that had something to do with it. Kelly immediately pounced and dismissed any such motive – and the segment moved directly from the local police who had called this workplace violence to an assertion that the Obama administration was behind this p.c. move.

The incident happened that day. I understand that breaking news may not have all the facts available to make full sense of it. But to assert he was arguably part of an international Jihadist group, already planning more attacks, to describe what prompted this horrifying act as solely terrorism, to watch Kelly’s widened incredulous, scandalized eyes asking over and over again why the police were still calling this as a preliminary measure an act of workplace violence … well, it was pure fear-mongering.

It turns out now that more facts are in that he’s obviously a deeply disturbed individual, singled out people he had a grievance about, had shown up at a local mosque and asked to have pictures taken (even though he was not a member of it and its members had no idea who he was), and had gotten into his sick head that he was an Islamic warrior, from reading on the Internet and watching the recent ISIS beheadings. He had just “converted” to Islam and was full of racist and misogynist poison. It would not be the first time an unstable individual had grappled with his demons by adopting some new religion and then went on a rampage to avenge those he had a grievance against. His weapon? A kitchen knife he had gone back to his apartment to get after being dismissed.

My point is not that this was not a horrifying act, and he faces the death penalty for it. My point is simply that the way this was covered reveals ever more starkly that we are in a new era now of the kind of paranoia and terror that sees a terrorist conspiracy behind any and every act of violence, that seeks to equate the acts of this disturbed and violent man as somehow indicative of the many Muslims in that community who were as appalled as anyone by this murder, and that is fast becoming national hysteria that shows no sign of abating.

America, my adopted home, is a place of wonder, of energy, of enterprise, of compassion, of risk and diversity. But it is now and always has been a place where deep-seated fear and paranoia have always simmered below the surface – where McCarthyism once stalked the land, where recent hysteria justified the American president authorizing appalling torture of hundreds of people (with complete impunity), where civil liberties were shredded in a period when more people were killed by lightning than by terrorism, where refugee children as young as eight or nine are treated as terrible dangers to the republic, where undocumented immigrants are left in permanent limbo and where legal immigrants are treated as threats first and assets second, and where our leaders, whom one might expect to calm the public, instead fan the flames of panic for short-term political gain.

The great achievement of those maniacs in Iraq and Syria is to have ignited this strain in American life, exploited the PTSD of 9/11, and brilliantly baited this country into another unwinnable, bankrupting war which will only deepen the polarization that leads to more terror – a war in which what’s left of democratic accountability and constitutional norms are once again under threat. I see no one in our elites, including the president, doing anything to calm this down. And I see a Republican landslide coming in the Congress this fall, with all the consequences of more war and more hysteria ahead.

Welcome to America, no longer the land of the free or the brave, but the land of the paranoid and terrified. I haven’t felt this glum since the Bush-Cheney years. Because, it appears, they never really ended.

The War On Ebola

Clint Hinote finds it “striking… how similar this struggle [against Ebola] is to counterinsurgency operations”:

Counterinsurgencies are long-term struggles. Systemic problems usually drive the creation of the insurgency in the first place, and until these underlying issues are addressed, the insurgency will simmer, sometimes mutating and reappearing later. The best counterinsurgency efforts address the root causes of the insurgency over time.

This fight against Ebola must also be a long-term effort, especially among the health care institutions within the affected countries. These have been decimated, and they must be rebuilt with the expertise and capacity to provide an acceptable level of care for the population. If this does not happen, the disease will return. There is a real fear among health experts that the disease will become endemic, existing in perpetuity among humans, mutating and spreading within the vulnerable population. If this tragic development is to be prevented, a long-term commitment to building health care infrastructure and institutions will be needed.

Rachel Kleinfeld argues that “ISIS and Ebola have the same root cause: failed governance”:

Liberia and Sierra Leone have been heralded in the West as success stories, countries that rebounded from devastating civil wars to rebuild their states. Liberia, particularly, has been showered with World Bank and other donor money thanks to its widely trusted president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. But under her, and in Sierra Leone, lies a broadly rotten apparatus of cronyism and patronage that has resulted in favoritism in public services and general government incapacity. Locals in remote villages see this, even if Western donors at Davos and the Clinton Global Initiative do not. And therein lies the formers’ distrust for their governments, which can now be measured in the spread of disease.

The West similarly thought it could buy and counsel a functional Iraqi military. Billions of U.S. dollars and years of our military troops’ lives were poured into twinning, training, providing equipment and mentoring Iraqi troops. But no amount of equipment and tactical training could build a military with the esprit de corps to fight when the country’s leadership marginalizes and betrays an entire portion of the population. The individuals could be well-trained, but the institution itself was rotten.

However, Adam Taylor suggests that the Texas Ebola case might help African patients:

Americans already seem well aware that helping other nations with their health problems can help Americans — a 2013 Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that 68 percent of respondents felt that spending money on improving health care in developing countries would help protect Americans from infectious diseases such as SARS, bird flu and swine flu.

However, it was only two weeks ago that the United States announced it would be sending 3,000 troops to West Africa to help fight Ebola. It was a big move, expected to cost $750 million in the next four months, but it came only after criticism from African leaders at what they saw was a delay in the mobilization of the United States’ considerable resources. Remember, for countries such as Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, this Ebola outbreak has been a problem since December, and they have struggled to contain it on their own.

 

The Shifting Senate Map

Senate Sabato

Larry J. Sabato and Kyle Kondik updated their Senate forecasts:

So many undecided contests are winnable for the GOP that the party would have to have a string of bad luck — combined with a truly exceptional Democratic get-out-the-vote program — to snatch defeat from the wide-open jaws of victory. Or Republicans would have to truly shoot themselves in the foot in at least one race, which has become a clear possibility over the last few weeks in Kansas.

Yesterday, Andrew Prokop flagged a Kansas poll:

Senate Democrats have gotten bad polling news in several states lately. But the unexpectedly competitive Kansas race has been a consistent bright spot — even though the party technically isn’t fielding a candidate. On Wednesday, the party got more good news in the state, as a new USA Today / Suffolk University poll showed Kansas Senator Pat Roberts (R) is trailing independent Greg Orman by five points, with the incumbent winning only 41 percent of the vote.

Enten makes the case that this “was actually a bad result for Orman”:

Twice previously, Public Policy Polling (PPP) found Orman up by 10 percentage points in a two-way matchup with Roberts. Fox News had Orman ahead by 6 points. Moreover, Suffolk has traditionally had a Democratic-leaning house effect, a measure of how a pollster’s results compare to other polls. The model adjusts for this, nudging Suffolk’s result 2 percentage point toward the GOP. Fox News surveys have a 3 percentage-point pro-Republican house effect, and PPP has a negligible one.

Aaron Blake wonders whether Orman’s lead can hold up:

The poll shows Orman’s favorable rating at 39 percent and his unfavorable rating at 25 percent. Those are good numbers — if they hold when more voters get to know him. Even among Republicans, Orman’s favorable/unfavorable split is a pretty-close 29/34. But lots of people still have yet to be introduced to Greg Orman, and it’s quite simply very hard to emerge from a hard-fought campaign with positive numbers like that. How does his positive image hold up after he’s carpet-bombed with ads labeling him a liberal (with little backup)?

Margaret Carlson comments on the Kansas Senate and governor races:

If [Kansas governor Sam] Brownback loses, his grand experiment dies with him, and his misadventure will give pause to other Republican governors who want to push through a right-wing agenda, even in conservative states.

As for Roberts, if he loses a fourth term to an independent, it shows that overly comfortable incumbents can be taken down by challengers other than Tea Party populists. President Barack Obama’s ability to enjoy two more years with Democrats in control of the Senate may come down to the victory of a candidate no one had heard of six weeks ago in a state where no one expected an upset.

Sargent thinks it’s no “exaggeration to say that three of the most important state-level experiments in conservative reform — all of which were outgrowths of the 2010 Republican triumph fueled by the Tea Party insurgency of Obama’s first term — are all, to varying degrees, standing in judgment before voters”:

Whoever wins in Wisconsin, Kansas, and North Carolina, it would probably be a mistake to read too much into what it says about public opinion and conservatism, since political races turn on so many factors. Indeed we may end up with something of a split verdict. But it’s striking that this cycle is shaping up as something of a test not just of the policies of the national party in possession of the White House, but of conservative governance as well.

John Cloud traveled to Alaska to cover another pivotal race:

Alaska is a notoriously difficult place to poll, but everyone assumes the contest is a dead heat. What has so far been a gentlemanly race between a good man who lost his dad here and a warrior who followed his wife here is about to change, for the meaner—a function of the stakes and the money that’s gushing in. Not just Rove’s millions, but Harry Reid’s, too. The moment Begich and I emerged from his SUV, a man paid to follow his every move with a camera asked why Begich opposed more oil-drilling jobs for Alaskans. (A strange question, since Begich has voted for more drilling and promises to vote for more.) Once we were out of camera range, Begich turned to me and smiled. He looked, for a moment, like a politician. “They will try anything,” he said. “But I know the state I grew up in. They don’t have that.”

Despite that, Republicans may be gaining ground in Alaska:

A survey shared with The Hill by Republican pollster Marc Hellenthal conducted for a coalition focused on ballot amendments found Sullivan with a lead over Begich, 46 percent to 42 percent. Dittman Research, a Republican firm that has a strong track record in the state, found Sullivan leading Begich 49 percent to 43 percent in a poll conducted for the pro-Sullivan U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Two recent automated polls also found Sullivan with a lead, though a pair of Democratic polls released in mid-September had Begich up by 5 points.

Last week, Sean Trende theorized that undecided voters may break towards Republicans:

The Democrats’ problem is that they seemingly find themselves in a position similar to that of Republicans in 2006: They are in tight races.  But so far, they seem unable to move past where the fundamentals suggest they should be able to go: Recall again that their maximum showing has generally been bounded at 47 percent.  … [S]ooner or later the undecided voters will begin to decide.  And given that the Democrats are winning the votes of almost everyone who approves of the president’s job, they will have an uphill — though hardly insurmountable — battle with undecided voters.

If this theory is right, we should expect to see these races continue on the basic trajectory we’ve seen over the past few weeks: Democrats holding at their current levels.  Eventually, Republicans should begin or continue to improve, as undecided voters engage and make up their minds, and as Republicans narrow the spending battles.  Even if this theory is true, it won’t occur in every race, but it will be the general tendency.

Rove, as is his habit, talks up the GOP’s chances:

In the Real Clear Politics average of public polls, there has been a clear movement since Sept. 22 toward the GOP. Despite a significant recent increase in negative attack ads from Sen. Reid’s Super PAC and liberal and labor special-interest groups, 10 of the 11 Republicans in the most competitive races for Democratic Senate seats improved or maintained their ballot position. Republicans now lead in contests for eight Democratic seats, enough for a GOP majority

 

When Does Spanking Become Abuse?

Two readers offer a startling contrast to this one’s story of trauma and terror:

I’m not often in agreement with Sean Hannity, but I must agree that Adrian Peterson should not lose his career or go to jail over the abuse of his kid. I don’t see a whole lot of people asking us folks who were actually hit. The courts. The judges. The politicians. The do-gooders, tolerant of everybody except those they deem unworthy of tolerance and understanding. Hardly anyone seems to think that the opinion of the victims should matter the most.

Is it a crime? Should it be a crime? I don’t know where to draw the line, and I’ve been there. At my ripe old-age of 62, I still vividly remember my father hitting my oldest brother – strapped spread eagle to his bed – until his back was covered with deep scarlet welts. I remember my legs shaking so much as it happened that I could hardly stand. I remember my mother smacking me over and over and over again with a fly swatter – her choice of punishment weapon. I remember my father putting a cigarette in my face, threatening to burn me with it.

And never ever ever would I have wanted my father to lose his career or to have to go to jail.

Do the people who propose this actually believe this would have made our life better? It would have done the opposite. Thank goodness that there was no Internet back then, and thank goodness that the media seemed to concentrate on real news and investigative reporting instead of the human interest stories they concentrate on now.

It surprises people that survivors of childhood violence love their parents. Why shouldn’t we? In the same way that I love my country but still feel free to criticize her, and would do anything to protect her, I can criticize my parents (and I freely do), but I fiercely defend their right to have lived their lives the way they saw fit and not to get thrown in jail for it or lose their financial means of support.

I survived – scarred, mutilated and torn – from a war waged everyday during my childhood. To take away my father’s livelihood or jail my parents would have been like dropping a nuclear warhead upon us. I doubt that I would have survived the chaos that ensued from that kind of retribution from society. This “Gotcha” mentality that exists today is just another example of destroying the village to save it.

“Scarred, mutilated and torn” is light-years from a swat on the butt. Another reader:

God damn it, Andrew. When I was a kid, my mother hit me. Repeatedly; always. My brother and I knew it was coming. She did it out of anger, and in an attempt to correct our incorrect behavior. Rarely did it achieve the latter goal, but given the nature of our disobedience – which was sometimes flagrant – she was right to be made, and we indeed deserved to be punished.

And as ineffective as the hitting was, want to know what would have been even less effective? The “time-out”; the “Go sit in that chair and think about what you did.” We would have outright laughed at that, my brother and I – punishment that isn’t really punishment. Well, the hitting forced us to actually respect my mother. Getting punishment that wasn’t really punishment would have diminished that respect.

So while I feel for your reader who seems to be describing her own PTSD at having been punishes, and while her punishment far exceeded what I had to endure, must we really go down the forever a victim road here? She writes of how corporal punishment is a way to try and intimidate, dominate, and control – and you know what? That’s true. Particularly disobedient children need to have their spirit broken. They need to understand authority – because if they don’t, they’re sure going to learn all about it later on.

A parent who spanks his or her child WITHIN REASON (and your reader’s case is that her corporal punishment wasn’t within reason – or was it that all corporal punishment is the moral equivalent of what she endured?) … that parent is saying: In life, there are rules, and you must respect them. And if you don’t respect them, there will be consequences – in this house, and out there in the broader society. For based on the nature of your misbehavior, the broader society is unlikely to respond with, “Now you go sit in that chair and think about what you did.”

When we talk about the coddled generation, or “Generation Wuss,” as Bret Easton Ellis calls it, it’s no coincidence that this generation – the fragile flowers, unable to handle real adversity – is the first one to have been raised in an era where corporal punishment, even the mildest forms, was increasingly regarded as barbaric. And I’d ask: is this generation, then, any better off, any better behaved, are they more respectful of authority, are they more disciplined – or is the opposite in fact true?

“Disobedient children need to have their spirit broken”? Jesus. And regarding the reader’s flip comment about society unlikely to punish people by putting them in time out: is society instead supposed to beat them into submission? Hitting people, especially when those people are small and defenseless and dependent on your care, is such a lazy and cruel way to discourage bad behavior.

Ebola Makes It To America, Ctd

Texas Hospital Patient Confirmed As First Case Of Ebola Virus Diagnosed In US

Abby Phillip covers how health officials are “tracing” those who’ve been in contact with America’s first Ebola patient, who has been identified as Thomas Eric Duncan:

“We are working from a list of about 100 potential or possible contacts and will soon have an official contact tracing number that will be lower,” Texas Department of State Health Services spokeswoman Carrie Williams said in a statement. “Out of an abundance of caution, we’re starting with this very wide net, including people who have had even brief encounters with the patient or the patient’s home. The number will drop as we focus in on those whose contact may represent a potential risk of infection.”​

A second individual, who Duncan had contact with, is currently under observation. Amanda Taub enumerates the resources the US has to prevent Ebola from doing the same damage it’s done in parts of Africa:

[T]he health care systems in the three worst-affected countries are so poor that basic equipment, including even latex gloves, is often not available.

Daniel Bausch, an associate professor at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine who is working on the Ebola response, told Vox that “if you’re in a hospital in Sierra Leone or Guinea, it might not be unusual to say, ‘I need gloves to examine this patient,’ and have someone tell you, ‘We don’t have gloves in the hospital today,’ or ‘We’re out of clean needles’ — all the sorts of things you need to protect against Ebola.”

In the United States, this just isn’t a problem. We have plenty of gloves, needles, PPEs, and other equipment. And if a hospital ran out and needed more, our reliable transportation infrastructure would make it possible to replenish the necessary supplies quickly.

By contrast, Benjamin Wallace-Wells focuses on the medical slip-up that delayed the diagnosis of Duncan:

During that first visit, an emergency nurse asked him whether he had traveled anywhere recently, a question meant to screen for Ebola exposure, and Duncan replied that he had just come from Liberia. “Regretfully that information was not fully communicated” to the rest of the medical team, the hospital chief executive said today, and Duncan was sent home, with a diagnosis of a “low-grade fever from a viral infection.” By the end of the weekend, he was back.

You have to feel for that nurse, and that medical team. Dallas officials are now monitoring five children for Ebola exposure who “possibly had contact with [Duncan] over the weekend.” If the nurse had successfully communicated the news about Duncan’s recent trip from Liberia to the rest of the medical team, he surely would have been in the hospital through the weekend, not at home near those children or anyone else.

Jonathan Cohn analyzes those diagnostic missteps, calling them “a mystery”:

The big question is why he was sent home in the first place.

Weeks ago, the Centers for Disease Control distributed guidelines to health care providers and hospitals, including instructions for early detection of the disease. Under those guidelines, medical professionals should suspect and test for Ebola when patients who have been to affected countries show symptoms, such as a fever over 101.5 degrees Fahrenheit, vomiting, or muscle pain. At that point, under the guidelines, it’s up to the doctors whether to keep and isolate the patient, or to let the patient leave while under some kind of monitoring.

Laurie Garrett expects Ebola diagnoses to only get harder:

The window for stopping hospital spread of diseases like Ebola is going to close as soon as the flu season begins, when feverish patients are commonplace. Influenza has yet to slam America for the 2014-2015 season, and that is fortunate. Once ERs and doctors’ offices get swamped with influenza sufferers — feverish, achy, exhausted — spotting Ebola cases will be complex and perhaps impossible in the absence of a rapid diagnostic test.

Arthur Caplan argues that the fixation on patient privacy could allow Ebola to spread:

Why do we need to know how [America’s first Ebola patient] got to the hospital? Because Americans have no idea–none–about what to do if they have the symptoms of Ebola or suspect someone might. Flu season is here. Should everyone with flu-like symptoms in Dallas, Atlanta or other cities where Ebola patients have been cared for run to the E.R.? Isn’t it a good idea to get a flu shot so you lessen the chance of thinking you have Ebola. This is what the CDC needs to explain. If your family member comes here from a country with Ebola and gets very ill you should do what—call 911, call the police, call the CDC, call a taxi to the closest hospital, go to a particular hospital with an isolation unit, stay home and let someone come and get you, go alone or with help?

And Belluz searches for a parallel to the Texas case:

While the Texas patient is the first-ever diagnosed with Ebola in America, several travelers have brought similarly deadly viruses to the US in the past and didn’t give them to anyone.

There have been four cases of Lassa hemorrhagic fever, a viral infection common in West Africa, here. This isn’t surprising since Lassa infects up to 300,000 people in Africa each year, which makes it a lot more common than Ebola. Like Ebola, Lassa isn’t easily spread — only through contact body fluids — so, reassuringly, there were no secondary cases here.

We’ve also had one case of Marburg, another hemorrhagic fever, imported to the US in a traveler from Uganda. Again, the patient didn’t transmit the virus to anyone else.

Our complete Ebola coverage is here.

(Photo: A general view of Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas where a patient has been diagnosed with the Ebola virus on September 30, 2014 in Dallas, Texas. By Mike Stone/Getty Images)

What Hobby Lobby Hath Wrought

In her dissenting opinion last June, Ruth Bader Ginsburg warned that the Hobby Lobby ruling would have far-reaching, unintended consequences. Others agreed. Looking at how the case has been applied in lower courts, Toobin argues that the Notorious RBG was right; the ruling is “opening the door for the religiously observant to claim privileges that are not available to anyone else”:

One such matter is Perez v. Paragon Contractors, a case that arose out of a Department of Labor investigation into the use of child labor by members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (The F.L.D.S. church is an exiled offshoot of the Mormon Church.) In the case, Vernon Steed, a leader of the F.L.D.S. church, refused to answer questions by federal investigators, asserting that he made a religious vow not to discuss church matters. Applying Hobby Lobby, David Sam, a district-court judge in Utah, agreed with Steed, holding that his testimony would amount to a “substantial burden” on his religious beliefs—a standard used in Hobby Lobby—and excused him from testifying.

But Ilya Somin maintains that the court made the right call, and that denying constitutional rights to corporations would in fact be disastrous:

If we consistently apply the principle that corporations are not entitled to constitutional rights because they are not real people, then the government would be free to censor newspapers and TV stations that use the corporate form, including the New York Times and CNN. Similarly, it would be free to take corporate property without paying the “just compensation” required by the Fifth Amendment, or search it in ways that would otherwise be forbidden by the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches and seizures. It could also regulate or ban services at houses of worship owned by the many religious organizations that use the corporate form. CNN, the New York Times, and the Catholic Church are no more “real” persons than Hobby Lobby Stores is. …

Had the Court ruled that either corporations in general or for-profit ones specifically cannot “exercise religion,” it would have led to the gutting of legal protection for religious freedom in numerous commercial contexts.

Meanwhile, Dawinder Sidhu points to an upcoming case, Holt v. Hobbs, which “will test whether the Roberts Court’s stance on religious freedom includes a minority faith, Islam, practiced by a disfavored member of our society: a prisoner”:

Holt involves Gregory Holt, an inmate in Arkansas also known as Abdul Maalik Muhammad. A dispute arose between Holt and the state’s Department of Correction when he sought to grow a one-half-inch beard in observance of his faith. According to the department’s grooming policies, inmates may only grow a “neatly trimmed mustache.” …

If Hobby Lobby and federal law are faithfully applied, Holt should prevail. Prisoners surrender many of their rights at the prison gates. “Lawful incarceration brings about the necessary withdrawal or limitation of many privileges and rights,” the Supreme Court wrote in Price v. Johnston more than 60 years ago. In 2000, however, Congress enacted the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) to help safeguard inmates’ religious freedom. The law states that the government may not place a substantial burden on a prisoner’s ability to practice his or her religion unless that burden is the “least-restrictive means” to achieve a “compelling” goal.